Like an old friend, the Art Institute of Chicago is treated by Chicagoans with familiarity and pride. With its bronze lions out front, it has stood where Adams Street meets Michigan Avenue for more than 100 years.
It’s a fantasy, of course, to think of the museum’s most famous artists — most of whom never set foot in Chicago — as our own. But many Chicagoans, thoroughly at home in the Art Institute, can lead guests directly to Monet’s haystacks. They “know” Paris because of Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and Caillebotte’s “Paris, A Rainy Day.” The lives of Van Gogh and Gauguin are topics of casual conversation in the galleries.
Yes, the works of the Impressionists and their associates are old friends, thanks to Chicago collectors who purchased so many of them when they seemed as raw and unfinished as . . . well, Chicago itself.
There are many other old friends at the Art Institute, too, but the wonderful thing about this museum, probably the most world-famous of Chicago’s many world-famous museums, is that its visitors keep making new friends as well. You might not like every work of art in the museum, but give it time. Many mellow with age, or maybe we do.
American experience
The last 10 years have been very good ones for the Art Institute. The curators have redesigned their galleries, reinstalled art and created a model museum that will seem fresh and exciting well into the 21st Century.
Point in fact: the Galleries of American Art, completed in 1997. The irony is, of course, that we know the artists of our own country less well than we know les grandes etoiles from France. But the American galleries feature works every bit as formidable as the European ones nearby. It’s interesting to see how painters like Sargent, Eakins, Cassatt and Homer were influenced by the French but brought something “American” to their canvases as well.
What’s notable about the best of the American works is that many seem to tell stories, though often with a light and subtle touch. It’s as if the American artist is eager, maybe more than the European, to teach a lesson as well as to present the scene at hand.
Art Institute curators seem eager to tell stories in these galleries as well. This they do by interspersing paintings with furniture and decorative arts — re-creating scenes from the colonial, art nouveau, arts-and-crafts and other periods from the American past.
Contemporary questions
Another recent change at the Art Institute is in the Galleries of Contemporary Art. “Contemporary” means after World War II, and the works in this part of the museum might leave you with a whole different set of questions — such as how artists can see the world so differently.
These galleries begin with Abstract Expressionism and its wild, surging forms; it continues through minimalism, and still the eras and styles keep coming. There’s Pop Art and its familiar images — like Warhol’s “Mao” and Lichtenstein’s cartoon-based paintings. Visitors who pay attention in these galleries can witness art history unfold.
Whistler’s other women
The Art Institute’s major temporary exhibit for the summer of 1998 is not one of the big French names. But it is one that many people will have heard of. The artist is Whistler, but his most famous work, the painting commonly known as “Whistler’s Mother” (its title is “Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother”), is not here.
The exhibit is “Songs on Stone: James McNeill Whistler and the Art of Lithography,” and it is as lyrical as its title. Whistler, who lived from 1834 to 1903, was a towering painter but also a master of lithography (a method of printing from a design drawn on a surface of stone or a similiar material).
The exhibit is filled with portraits of women, many of them ravishing, and “nocturnes,” primarily depictions of English waterfronts at night. These achieve sublime color and subtle form.
One of the interesting aspects of the Whistler exhibit is not just the virtuosity of the art but also the virtuosity of the installation’s design, which closely follows Whistler’s own ideas about exhibitions. Light frames seem to float on the wall. A translucent canopy overhead softens light. Yellow accents are everywhere. These and other historical touches ought to make a lasting impression on visitors who allow themselves to be carried back in time.
Japan and beyond
A more forward-looking exhibit at the Art Institute for summer 1998 is “Japan 2000: Design for the Japanese Public,” a glimpse into the contemporary and futuristic work of architecture and industrial design in Japan. This exhibit focuses on buildings and products highlighted by the Japanese government’s “Good Design Selection System.” It shows off much of the best that the country has to offer.
Japanese architecture is leading-edge worldwide. In the exhibit catalog, Art Institute curator John Zukowsky writes of the buildings selected: “Noteworthy and significant are the Japanese traditions of politeness, formality, punctuality and cleanliness, all of which can be explained as their only way of controlling the high density and potential chaos of their spatially restrictive surroundings.”
In product design, the Japanese also excel, bringing the traditional values of handcrafts to the conception and manufacture of modern products, such as watches, computers, cars and many other things. (How they bridge the traditional with the cybernetic age is one mystery of the exhibit.)
Friend and teacher
Many other worlds can be seen at the Art Institute, of course, from the familiar to the obscure. Collections and scholarship at the Art Institute go as deep as just about anyone could want. But there’s a lot here for everyone. The collection of arms and armor is a big attraction for youngsters, as are the Thorne Rooms exhibit with its legendary miniatures. In the Galleries of Ancient Art, a recent interactive program provides a glimpse of how museums may be educating visitors in the future.
For those who love the art of non-Western cultures, Africa is well represented, particularly from the Yoruba lands in Nigeria. Chinese ceramics and scroll painting are seriously collected and are lavishly exhibited in galleries that were built just a few years ago. India and Southeast Asia are the source of wonderful sacred art carved in stone; examples fill halls that lead many visitors to take unintended detours on their way to other places.
The Art Institute is a great teacher, certainly, but so much of what it contains is just striking, interesting and even fun before it seems educational at all. That is why you see whole families at the museum. They come and spend hours in a place that makes them feel at ease and gives them pleasure.
That’s a real credit to the Art Institute. Chicago can be proud of these collections of paintings, prints, sculpture and other works. But what may be most important about this museum is that it has made art an experience for everyone in Chicago, not just the pastime of a few.
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The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., is open 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays (open until 8 p.m. Tuesdays), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Suggested admission is $8 adults, $5 seniors and children. Kids under 5 are free. (Everyone gets in free on Tuesdays.) 312-443-3600.
